Fall in U.S. birthrate may be tied to recession

Experts think money worries led to 2nd yearly decline in row, lowest rate in century

by Marilynn Marchione - Aug. 28, 2010 12:00 AMAssociated Press

The U.S. birthrate has dropped for a second year in a row, and experts think the wrenching recession led many people to put off having children. The 2009 birthrate also set a record: the lowest in a century.

Births fell 2.6 percent last year, even as the population grew, numbers released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics show.

"It's a good-sized decline for one year. Every month is showing a decline from the year before," said Stephanie Ventura, a demographer who oversaw the report.

The birthrate, which takes into account changes in the population, fell to 13.5 births for every 1,000 people last year. That's down from 14.3 in 2007 and way down from 30 in 1909, when it was common for people to have big families.

"It doesn't matter how you look at it - fertility has declined," Ventura said.

The situation is a striking turnabout from 2007, when more babies were born in the United States than any other year in the nation's history. The recession began that fall, dragging down stocks, jobs and births.

"When the economy is bad and people are uncomfortable about their financial future, they tend to postpone having children. We saw that in the Great Depression the 1930s and we're seeing that in the Great Recession today," said Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University.

"It could take a few years to turn this around," he added, noting that the birthrate stayed low throughout the 1930s.

Another possible factor in the drop: a decline in immigration to the United States.

The downward trend invites worrisome comparisons to Japan and its "lost decade" of choked growth in the 1990s and low birthrates. Births in Japan fell 2 percent in 2009 after a slight rise in 2008, its government has said.

Not so in Britain, where the population took its biggest jump in almost half a century last year and the fertility rate is at its highest level since 1973. France's birthrate also has been rising; Germany's rate is lower but rising as well.

"Our birthrate is still higher than the birthrate in many wealthy countries, and we also have many immigrants entering the country," Cherlin said. "So, we do not need to be worried yet about a birth dearth." He said such a dearth would crimp the nation's ability to take care of its growing elderly population.

The new U.S. report is a rough count of births from states. It estimates there were about 4.1 million births in 2009, down from an estimated 4.2 million births in 2008 and more than 4.3 million in 2007.

The report does not give details on trends in different age groups. That will come next spring and will give a clearer picture of who is and is not having children, Ventura said.

Last spring's report, on births in 2008, showed an overall drop but a surprising rise in births to women over 40, who may have felt they were running out of time to have children and didn't want to delay despite the bad economy.

Women postponing having children because of careers also may find they have trouble conceiving, said Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington, D.C.-based demographic-research group.

"For some of those women, they're going to find themselves in their mid-40s where it's going to be hard to have the number of children they want," he said.

Heather Atherton is nearing that mark. The Sacramento mom, who turns 36 next month, started a home-based public-relations business after having a baby girl in 2003. She and her husband upgraded to a larger home in 2005 and planned to have a second child not long afterward. Then, the recession hit, drying up her husband's sales commissions and leaving them owing more on their home than it is worth. A second child seemed too risky financially.

"However, we just recently decided that it's time to stop waiting and just go for it early next year and let the chips fall where they may," she said. "We can't allow the recession to dictate the size of our family. We just need to move forward with our lives."